THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC; IN THE LAND OF THE BLIND CAUDILLO

By Mark Kurlansky; Mark Kurlansky, a writer based in Miami, is working on a book about the politics and social problems of the Caribbean.

Published: August 6, 1989

IN THE MIDDLE OF A VILLAGE OF brightly painted wooden huts a helicopter touches down and a small, elderly, blind man, smartly dressed in a gray suit and gray fedora, is carefully helped out and guided into a long, black Lincoln. The limousine, license plate 0-1, immediately speeds 100 yards to a roped-off area of freshly turned earth and neat new concrete houses. Here, the blind man is helped out once again, then is led to a table where peasants stand, waiting restlessly behind a line of pot-bellied officers, in uniforms draped with braids.

The master of ceremonies steps up to a microphone and begins to speak. These new housing units, he tells the peasants, have been constructed by ''El Presidente'' - not by the government, not by a ministry, but by ''El Presidente, Joaquin Balaguer.''

At this, Balaguer stands up, his finger tips feeling for the edge of the table to get his bearings, takes the keys that the general beside him places in his hand and presents them one by one to the peasants who step forward. Next, as the master of ceremonies announces that ''El Presidente Joaquin Balaguer will give the children bicycles and dolls!'' the children are led forward one by one and they dutifully give the President a kiss on his pale right cheek.

Then the President is put back in the limousine, rushed the few yards to the helicopter and thence to the ornate National Palace, in the center of Santo Domingo, where he will continue a tightly packed work schedule late into the night.

This scene, complete with dolls and bicycles, is replayed twice a week. When Balaguer returned to power in August 1986 (he was President from 1966 to 1978), he began inaugurating a government construction project every Saturday morning; then, as more projects came on line, Thursday mornings were added. Now, Tuesday mornings are sometimes needed as well.

By his own account, Balaguer is spending $26 million a month - some economists estimate as much as $40 million - on a building spree in which he personally hands out every contract, every dollar and every key. In this Caribbean nation that has known more violence than democracy, that has been invaded and occupied by United States troops twice in this century and shares a tense border with even less stable Haiti, Balaguer is hoping that construction will create enough jobs, generate enough growth and spread enough good will to stave off another crisis.

But it is not working. Though every rural hill and city block seems to have its construction site -monuments, schools, houses, offices, parks, a museum, an aquarium, even a model prison, all bearing signs crediting President Joaquin Balaguer -basic services, such as electricity and water, are steadily deteriorating. There are nightly blackouts across most of the country. The capital city of 1.3 million people seems to be regularly unplugged, plunged into eerie darkness and silence for hours at a time. While President Balaguer was explaining to me that this was the fault of the neglect of the last Government, the National Palace briefly blacked out, a fact he did not notice but which seemed to greatly embarrass his aides.

The problem is simple: the Government doesn't have the money to pay for its many construction projects, so it prints new money. Inflation, at a 6.3 percent annual rate in 1986, reached an unprecedented 58.9 percent last year, and many predict it will touch 70 percent this year. Peasants, workers and merchants have all seen the standard of living plummet. In 1986, a quarter of all Dominicans lived below the Government's absolute poverty line, according to Luis Julian Perez, Balaguer's former central bank director; today, as many as half of them do.

Many Dominicans believe the point of spontaneous combustion is close, and tens of thousands have left, most of them for the United States. As discontent grew last spring, union leaders said they were afraid to call a strike. ''People are very unhappy; we are not sure what they will do,'' said Nelsida Marmolejos, secretary general of the Majority Workers Union, a major left-leaning union. ''There are a lot of people who do not have food. We could call a 24-hour strike and there could be assaults, destruction, deaths. We don't want to experience what happened in Venezuela,'' where at least 250 people died during food riots last March. But late in June, in the most severe of a series of violent demonstrations, a general strike call by the major unions led to confrontations between young unemployed workers and the police in which at least four people died and hundreds were arrested.

Ironically, as the fear of political destabilization grows, many Dominicans are turning their eyes to the very man who has become a symbol of Dominican political instability - the enfant terrible of Dominican politics, an 80-year-old self-avowed Marxist and longtime personal friend of Fidel Castro, former President Juan Bosch.

Bosch - whose brief term as president in 1963 ended with the coup and civil war that set the stage for the American invasion in 1965 - has already announced his candidacy for the next quadrennial presidential election, next May. One private poll commissioned by a conservative business group showed Bosch 8 points ahead of Balaguer (who most insiders insist will run again, though he would be 86 on the completion of another term). That is not welcome news for businessmen or the extreme right-wing elements of the military. Nor is it welcomed by United States officials, who are worried by Bosch's Cuban ties and, despite their concerns over the state of the Dominican economy, still appear to back Balaguer, offering his Government an estimated $57 million in aid this year, according to an official in the United States Embassy in Santo Domingo.